To celebrate the launch of our new book, Happy Ever After: Financial Freedom Isn’t A Fairytale, we are posting excerpts from the book, specifically the fairytale segments of our favourite spoiled little princess being taught about money, savings, and investing by her talking pet frog, Charlie Croaker.
The Cinderella Side-Gig
The puzzled princess still didn’t understand.
“What about Cinderella?” she begged. “Are you telling me that’s not true? That could happen to me too!”
“Hahaha!” croaked the frog for so long that the princess almost started to worry that he couldn’t talk anymore, and it was all just a bad dream.
“‘When was the last time you had to spend the night cleaning the kitchen and then sleep on the cold stone floors?” Charlie asked, when he could finally croaking. “You don’t even have a stepmother, let alone a wicked one.”
“But…” she begged, “The prince…”
“…was an idiot, like most princes, doing nothing but holding parties, sending scouts out looking for the prettiest girls in the land, and in the process bankrupting his father,” explained Charlie.
“And the glass slipper?”
“One of the prince’s stupidest ideas,” said Charlie. “They didn’t fit anyone, and shattered if you walked on them – a disaster! Let me tell you about the Cinderella I knew…”
To start with, the princess thought the story sounded roughly the same. Cinderella’s mother had died, her father remarried, and she was treated like a servant by her stepmother and step-sisters. It all sounded so terrible that the princess felt the need to interrupt.
“And then the fairy godmother…” she suggested.
“And then Cinderella’s real godmother stopped by” explained Charlie, “She was an old friend of Cinderella’s mother, and she saw how much work Cinderella was doing and how well she did her work. She told Cinderella that she shouldn’t just do this work for free, and that she could come and live with her, and work as a professional house-cleaner.”
“What? This isn’t right!”
“Cinderella’s godmother was an independent businesswoman-“
“What did she do?” the princess interrupted Charlie.
“She had a carriage rental business. No, not ones made from pumpkins, princess,” Charlie knew he needed to explain, but leaving out that the carriages needed to be returned before midnight to avoid late charges. “She told Cinderella that independence, was the most important thing in the world, and there was no point hoping a prince would rescue her because, one, princes don’t do that – why would they? – and two, that’s just swapping dependence on one person for dependence on another.
Cinderella’s problem wasn’t that she was working, it was that she wasn’t working to be free.”
“So she ran away to live with her godmother?”
“To start with yes. Her godmother encouraged her to build a side-business, doing emergency cleaning, called “Cinderella’s Magic Helpers”. She eventually turned that into her main business, hiring other young ladies who worked too hard for not enough money, helping them make better incomes and provide amazing service. She learnt to save the money she made from that, invested it wisely so that it could make money all on its own, without her doing any work at all. That’s how she learnt to take ownership of her life so that she could be free to live any kind of life she wanted, without relying on a prince, or anyone else, and,” concluded Charlie, “she learnt that she had to do it all right now.,”
“Then,” corrected the princess. “She had to do it then.”
“Now, princess. There is no other time,” Charlie replied.
“That’s a really unsubtle hint that I have to start learning this stuff now too, isn’t it?” asked the princess.
“Well, unless you can think of a good reason to delay being Happy Ever After’.”
After a bit of thought, the princess asked “Do I have a godmother, fairy or real, who can teach me all of this?” as she knew that Charlie was right, and she had a lot to learn.
“No,” croaked Charlie. “You have a talking pet frog. I think that’s enough make-believe for one story, don’t you?”
In the illustration on the cover of Happy Ever After, we show our princess at the start of some forests. She doesn’t know what she’s about to walk into, and she definitely doesn’t know how to get out of the woods once she steps in.
Like the rest of us.
The goal of Happy Ever After is to show a way out of the woods, to shorten the path so we aren’t lost and looking for help our whole lives. I wrote it for my daughter, the inspiration for the princess in the stories, to understand how she can make her own way in the world, and never feel lost. I hope you can use it to do the same for your little princesses and princes too.
